Considering this is Real-Time Strategy (RTS) for the younger set, Ant Nation provides all the proper window dressing to appeal to kids. The ant characters conform to what we all imagine as "cute," thanks to films like Antz, but even kids' movies depict more struggle and strife than Ant Nation. The picture painted for an ant's life in this game is pretty vanilla. All work and no play, unless you consider battles with alien insects to be much fun. The detail view, when you zoom in to inspect individual ants, is where the game creates most of its personality. Your top-down strategy view literally depicts the ants like so many little bits of pepper on the screen, making it hard to sustain great interest beyond the first few hours.

There is lots of good visual and audio feedback during the game, by default. Think of this as RTS on training wheels. You get a screen message about each new quest, and can hear attackers in your territory during normal exploration. Ants defeated in battle, or hurt during training, will give a little squeak and show by a small icon that they are temporarily out of commission. The split-screen view is handy for seeing what happens underground in the ant colony, and you'll sometimes be alerted through visual cues that your attention is required there. A nice little pop soundtrack follows you throughout the game, repetitious but unobtrusive. The kids will dig it.

Ant Nation features a fantastic premise, but fails to deliver on mission variety. Doing a scaled-back RTS is fine, and sorely needed on this platform. Kiddie Platformers, Kart Racing, and other less complicated variations on big kids' games have driven handheld platforms to great heights and built a devoted following of young gamers. Our youngest gamers are kind of a renewable resource, a demographic group that constantly cast about for the games and systems most sensitive to their needs. Strategy games are more in the comfort zone of mature readers and thinkers, embodied in games like Civilization. Where Ant Nation gets it right is in offering kids a chance to build an ant colony using available resources, and providing the tools to gather those resources. Strife and obstacles are present to keep things interesting, and there's even a multiplayer option to test your wits against a friend's ant colony.

What's missing is the constant feeling of novelty that one gets in the first hour. Mission types boil down to gathering items or fighting enemies, each using exactly one of two types of ant in your colony. The option exists to train ants to use special elemental attacks, which is an odd addition to an otherwise realistic game. Okay, considering the premise of Ant Nation is that the colony was engineered by a scientist to defend against invading alien insects, it may not be so odd... The rock-paper-scissors aspect of elemental battle isn't new to kids, and they'll figure out quickly that they don't need to worry about elements to win battles. You'll wait too long before advancing to new levels, and once you build a full colony, it feels like you're in maintenance mode. Very young players may be satisfied with this for a while, but it doesn't bode well for a long shelf life. Multiplayer focuses entirely on battling, as opposed to co-op exploration or mission completion. Lack of online access means no trading or accessing additional content that also might have extended the life of the game.

We can understand younger kids needing things more focused and accessible, but Ant Nation scales back difficulty to such an extent that things veer into screensaver territory. Autopilot this ain't, but when the only mission variety is between gathering or hunting, there's a problem. Part of this comes from weak direction. Instead of teaching kids to divide their ants and giving them multipronged objectives, Ant Nation allows only one mission at a time. Splitting the ants by type or by objective only happens later in the game, and even then isn't very clearly demonstrated. The training feature is okay, but elemental interaction has too little impact to be a very meaningful part of the game. Perhaps the biggest turn-off for us was that there's very little penalty for getting it wrong in the game. Ants damaged in battle just squeak and run back to the colony to get patched up. If there's one thing kids know from direct experience, it's the squashable, smashable, step-onabble vulnerability of an ant. Making these ants so durable not only rings hollow, it misses an opportunity to create some real strategy elements in the game. Kids understand the concept of risk/reward, and the rewards here begin to ring hollow when they are gained without sufficient risk.

What Ant Nation got wrong about gameplay, it most definitely got right about controls. Simple controls that don't clutter the screen are apparent as you learn to play, and the strange thing is that the control scheme itself appears to be better thought out than many aspects of gameplay. It's as if the team working on interface and the team working on gameplay design needed to switch places periodically... Some tools, such as the pipette (for sucking up ants) have almost no utility other than forcing a recycle of ants into energy for the colony. This, along with tools to recycle colony real estate, are intended to provide the resource management portion of Ant Nation, but just don't have a strategic connection to gameplay. The tools used for directing groups of ants toward objectives are well implemented using touch-screen controls, but also should have been leveraged earlier and more often in the game's narrative. A wide array of reports and progress charts make for a fun distraction, or you can hone in on particular ants for bonding moments with members of your colony. Everything, with the exception of some filters you trigger using the shoulder buttons for viewing specific types of ants, is handled with the stylus.

Ease of use doesn't translate into loads of fun gameplay, unfortunately. Ant Nation promises more than it delivers, although some real creativity went into its creation. Kids will dig into the game and enjoy themselves for a few hours, but will likely lose interest once the missions start recycling. There are several "worlds" you can open up for exploration in the game, but most kids will bail out early. Unlike its ancestor SimAnt, this version of ant strategy gaming doesn't dig deep enough.